Chris Stephenson‘s SuperQuest presentation “And Now the Hard Work Begins: Achieving the Promise of Computer Science Education” was live-posted from SuperQuest in early August and I have now added the promised summary/scaffolding.

Chris Stephenson is the Head of CS Education Programs at Google, the former founding Executive Director of ACM’s Computer Science Teacher Association, and a Eugene resident.

Highlights of her presentation:

• There’s a rich history of CS Education and advocacy grounded in Oregon — Computer Science Teachers Association (both ACM’s and Oregon’s), ISTE, NCCE, and more.
• She called out President Obama’s CS for All Initiative — more on that here from Ruthe Farmer’s presentation at the OCSTA CS Education in Oregon Symposium in June.
• Chris is very clear that Google is not pushing a one-size-fits-all Silver Bullet. They do not presume to know more about teaching, learning, and students than teachers and educators do. Chris and Google are looking to teachers and educators in and afterschool to set out needs, requirements, and collaborations.
• Google brings advocacy to build political will to enable change.
• Google creates and supports resources:
  • Google CS Education — it’s all here
  • CSFirst (I overheard some teachers raving about this at one of the SuperQuests)
  • Exploring Computational Thinking (not to be confused with the NSF ExploringCS curriculum) for students
    • great video on computational thinking in Google Earth
  • Computational Thinking Course for educators
  • CS4HS — helping organizations and institutions stage high quality CS PD for high school educators
  • Google Programs to Inspire Girls
    • Made with Code
    • and a mentoring program connecting girls with Google engineers
  • Blockly — block based programming interface
  • PencilCode — bridging the gap between block-based and text-based programming
  • IgniteCS — retention of diverse undergraduates in CS
• There is lots of work yet to be done, and a great deal of it depends on the teachers on the front lines. Thank you.

Technical note on the slides: “IDE” is an acronym for Integrated Development Environment, a software tool to help people write, run, test, and debug code.

Respectfully submitted,
Jo Oshiro
jo@oregoncsta.org

Update: summary of slides